PARIS (AP) – As the pale winter sun sets over the French Champagne region, the countdown starts.
Workers stop pruning the vines when the light fades at about 4:30 PM, leaving them 90 minutes to get in from the cold, take off their work clothes, jump in their cars, and zoom home for a curfew of 6:00 pm.
Forget after-work socializing with friends, after-school kids’ clubs, or evening shopping outside quick outings for essentials. Police on patrol demand valid reasons from people being seen outside. For those without them, the threat of escalating fines for curfews makes life outside of the weekend increasingly just work and not play.
“Life stops at 6 pm,” says champagne producer Alexandre Prat.
In an effort to avoid the need for a third nationwide lockdown that would further damage Europe’s second-largest economy and endanger more jobs, France opts instead for creeping curfews. Large parts of Eastern France, including most regions bordering Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, live under movement restrictions from 6pm to 6am. At 12 noon, curfew is the longest anywhere in the 27 countries of the European Union.
The rest of France will follow from Saturday. The prime minister on Thursday announced an extension of the curfew from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. to cover the entire country, including zones where the nightly deadline for homecoming had only started at 8 p.m.
French shops must close at 6pm. Outdoor activities will be discontinued, with the exception of quick walks for pets. Employees need employer bills to commute or travel for work after curfew.
Those who have lived with the longer curfew in recent weeks say it is often bad for business and what was left of their anemic social life during the pandemic.
Until a few weeks ago, the curfew didn’t go into effect until 8 p.m. in the region of Prat, the Marne. Customers still stopped to buy bottles of his family’s bubbly on the way home, he said. But when the cut-off time was brought forward to 6 p.m. to delay viral infections, the drinkers disappeared.
“We don’t have anyone now,” said Prat.
The village where the pensioner Jerome Brunault lives alone in the Burgundy wine region, is also located in one of the zones that close as early as 6pm. , the so-called “apero” gatherings so beloved by the French that were rushed but still feasible when curfew began two hours later.
“With the 6:00 pm curfew, we can no longer go to friends for a drink,” said Brunault. “I now spend my days talking to no one except the baker and some people on the phone.”
By extending the 6:00 pm curfew nationwide by at least 15 days, the government aims to limit infections in the country where more than 69,000 known virus deaths have occurred. It also aims to slow the spread of a highly contagious variant of the virus that has engulfed neighboring Britain, where new infections and virus deaths have skyrocketed.
An earlier curfew fights the transmission of viruses “precisely because it serves to limit the social interactions people can have at the end of the day, for example in private homes,” said French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.
Curfew elsewhere in Europe all start later and often end earlier.
The curfew in Italy runs from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., as well as the curfew from Friday evening to Sunday morning in Latvia. Regions of Belgium that speak French have a curfew from 10 PM to 6 AM, while in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium the hours are from midnight to 5 AM
People who are in Hungary between 8 PM and 5 AM must be able to show the police written proof from their employer that they are working or commuting.
There is no curfew in Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Sweden, Poland or the Netherlands, although the Dutch government is considering whether imposing a curfew would delay new COVID-19 cases.
In France, critics of the 6pm curfew say that people are actually more crammed together after work, when they pile on public transport, clog roads, and run errands in a narrow rush hour window before they have to get home.
Women’s rugby coach Felicie Guinot says that negotiating rush hour in Marseille has become a nightmare. The city in the South of France is one of the places where the more contagious virus variant is starting to flare up.
“It’s a scramble, so anyone can be home by 6pm,” said Guinot.
In historic Besançon, the fortified town that was the birthplace of “Les Misérables”, author Victor Hugo, the owner of the Jean-Charles Valley music store says the 6:00 pm deadline means that people no longer come after work to play with the guitars and other instruments he sells. Instead, they rush home.
“People are completely demoralized,” said Valley.
In Dijon, the French city known for its pungent mustard, the working mother of two Celine Bourdin says her life has narrowed down to “letting kids go to school and go to work, then go home, help kids with homework. and prepare dinner. “
But even that cycle is better than a repeat of France’s closure at the start of the pandemic, when schools were also closing, Bourdin says.
“If my kids don’t go to school, I won’t be able to work,” she said. “It was terribly difficult to be stuck in the house for almost 24 hours a day.”
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Leicester reported from Le Pecq, France. AP journalists from all over Europe contributed.
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